President Obama and Mitt Romney spent a record-breaking $2 billion on their campaigns. Plus, Vincent van Gogh's 'Self-Portait' comes to L.A., and our fair city gets its first poer laureate, Eloise Klein Healy, LAUSD wants to make arts core to curriculum, but it won't be easy. Then, Friday Flashback, The Dinner Party and actor Robert Carlyle joins us to discuss his new film, "California Solo."
Obama, Romney campaigns break fundraising record
According to reports filed late yesterday with the Federal Election Commission, President Obama and Mitt Romney spent $2 billion on their presidential campaigns. It's a record breaking number for a White House bid.
Westminster’s Tri Ta first elected Vietnamese-American mayor
Tri Ta laughs at the suggestion he’s a celebrity in his community, even though, seemingly, every Vietnamese American media outlet has called him for an interview.
“I never call myself any star,” he says, sitting in the lobby of a local public television station where he was just interviewed. “I’m only a humble person, and I love to serve people.”
Ta, 39, says that’s why he ran for City Council in the Orange County city of Westminster six years ago, and why he ran for mayor. He beat businesswoman Penny Loomer in November, thanks to nearly unanimous support from Vietnamese Americans and the backing of longtime Mayor Margie Rice, who is retiring.
Westminster is home to the Little Saigon neighborhood, and has the largest concentration of Vietnamese Americans in the nation – about 35,000. Orange County is home to nearly about 190,000 Vietnamese Americans.
Most of them emigrated to the U.S. after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Ta didn’t arrive until 1992, at the age of 19, when his father was granted political asylum.
“He wrote some book against the communists. That’s why they imprisoned him for many years,” Ta said with little emotion. He’s repeated the story many times.
Ta earned a degree from Cal State, L.A. in political science and worked for a state assemblyman. But for the past six years his day job has been managing editor of a bilingual trade magazine for nail technicians. He says it’s estimated that three-fourths of nail salon workers in California are Vietnamese women.
Ta does his own nails: “I’m a simple man.”
Ta’s election represents another step in the maturation of the Vietnamese American political community, says UC-Irvine Professor Linda Vo.
“Given that they’re a refugee population who came here en masse 30 years ago, it's pretty significant that they’ve been able to get involved in electoral politics in such a short period of time,” says Lo, who wrote “Mobilizing an Asian American Community.”
In Orange County, Vietnamese Americans sit on the Orange County Board of Supervisors, on local city councils and have served in the state Assembly.
It should be noted John Tran was mayor of Rosemead, but it was a rotating position for council members. So Westminster is the first city to elect a Vietnamese-American mayor.
Most Vietnamese American politicians are Republican – a fact that fails to capture the changing political mood of the community. The anti-communist fervor that drove them to the GOP remains, but only about a third now register Republicans.
People are realizing Democrats aren’t “a bunch of communists,” especially younger U.S.-born Vietnamese-Americans, says Hao-Nhien Vu, former editor of Nguoi Viet Daily in Westminster and author of the blog Bolsavic.
“We don’t have the kind of strong party affiliation like people who for example, their parents were Democrats and their grandparents were Democrats, so they are Democrats,” Hao-Nhien Vu said.
The Westminster-mayor elect says Republicans have done a poor job reaching out, and the party’s anti-immigration rhetoric annoys him. But the GOP is still the best match for Tri Ta.
“I believe in the principals of the party,” he says. “I believe in family values, I believe in more freedom in business. I believe in less government control.”
Ta takes over a city facing a deficit and layoffs. He hopes to attract more business, and with it tax revenues to the city of 90,000, which sits south of Long Beach off the 405 Freeway.
His wife Ahn Dohn, a pharmacist, sits with him during the interview. They wrote a book of poetry and philosophy together. She offers him advice, based on their mutual love of Yosemite.
“When we go hiking, it’s not to conquer any peaks, but it’s actually to conquer ourselves – be patient to get to the summit,” she says.
Ta nods his head. Patience has led him places. He is a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and hiked to the top of Mount Whitney.
“Its the highest mountain in the lower 48 states!” he said.
Later, Ta quotes the great Greek philosophers. He notes that Aristotle said good leaders must merely follow the law, but Socrates and Plato had another idea.
“They came up with the idea that a good citizen must be a good human being – that not only you obey the law, but you must be honest to yourself, and to your family, and to your community,” Ta says.
Complete honesty could pose problems for a politician.
“I totally recognize that,” Ta says. “But I want to believe that philosophy and will continue to carry that philosophy until the end of my life.
Friday Flashback: Job figures, Bush on immigration, John McAfee and more
James Rainey of the LA Times and David Gura of Marketplace chew on the week's big stories, including the sequestration condundrum, George Bush's comments about immigration at a conference in Dallas, John McAfee's shenanigans in Guatemala and the death of NewsCorp's iPad-only newspaper, The Daily.
LAUSD faces obstacles in effort to make arts part of core curriculum
We often hear about the decline of arts education in schools, especially with all of the budget cuts made over the last few years. Now, the L.A. Unified School District is trying to reverse that trend. This fall, the district's board voted unanimously to make arts part of the public schools' core curriculum.
But turning that desire into a reality is more complicated than it might seem. KPCC's Tami Abdollah joins the show to discuss the effort and what roadblocks schools may face. She's been working for months on a collaborative project with grad students and arts journalism fellows at USC's Annenberg School for Communication.
Van Gogh's 'Self Portrait' comes to Los Angeles
As part of an exchange with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Pasadena's Norton Simon Museum will now be showing the work of one of the greatest artists ever, Vincent van Gogh, from today until March 4, 2013.
His hauntingly compelling Self Portrait, was produced in late August 1889, less than a year before his untimely death at age 37, in July 1890.
“The words that one normally thinks of with Van Gogh are rapid movement and electrifying light, and I think that the color is something that also is sort of the calling card for van Gogh, especially at this point, at this juncture in his life,” said Chief Curator Carol Togneri, about Self Portrait.
Self Portrait comes from a time when van Gogh traveled to Paris a second time and ended up in the South of France. He became overwhelmed by the color, light, and rustic nature that encapsulated life in the south and eventually, after much pleading, convinced his friend Paul Gauguin to join him in this new movement in art.
While living and working together, the two artists viciously fought. Their conflict ultimately brought on the infamous event of van Gogh severing off his own ear. The incident led to Van Gogh’s stay in an institution in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Self Portrait was created.
Though the work shows van Gogh with his ear intact, Togneri says the artist was likely painting himself using a mirror. In a painting prior to this, however, van Gogh painted himself with a bandage on his head. Togneri says it’s unclear as to why he decided to omit it in this instance.
“Is it a way of saying, ‘I’m on the mend?’ Is it a way of saying not only that he is perhaps healing but that he is feeling more confident as an artist himself and thus shows himself as an artist?” Togneri asked.
Throughout his 10-year career, van Gogh painted a total of 36 self portraits, but portrayed himself as an artist only three times. Togneri explained that van Gogh was actually quite obsessed with painting heads and human figures, even begging his brother Theo for money to pay models for practice.
“When he didn’t have recourse to human figures, or when he frightened them away because of his strange periodic attacks or personality, he would revert to painting himself,” said Togneri. “Or he’d paint anybody in a field that he could get to pose for a very limited amount of time. I think he paints himself because he has a certain amount of self introspection. But I also think he paints himself because he needed to have models.”
Ann Hoenigswald, of the National Gallery of Art, will give a lecture at the Norton Simon Museum in March 2013, during which she will speak about how van Gogh built up the layers on his canvas and his use of color, specifically relating to the self portait painting on exhibition.
“That’s what’s so amazing to me,” Togneri added, “is to be able to read through it and see the way his mind was working as he was conceptualizing about this.”
The Southern Mexican border and illegal immigration's new frontier
The number of people crossing into the U.S. from Mexico illegally has dropped dramatically since peaking in 2007. But now, U.S. officials are starting to watch the flow of humans, guns and drugs at another frontier: the southern Mexican border.
Central Americans looking to enter the U.S. are travelling through the porous line between Mexico and Guatemala, and that's allowing the smugglers and gangs controlling those routes a chance to thrive.
Here with more on the shifting trends in immigration is Sebastian Rotella, investigative reporter with ProPublica.
Roma people take circuitous route to asylum in Canada
An increasing number of ethnic Roma, people otherwise known as "gypsies," have been seeking asylum recently in Canada. But the path they take to get there is quite curious: flying from Europe into Mexico, driving into California's Imperial Valley, working their way across the country to a small town in Vermont before heading north into Quebec.
Wilson Ring of the Associated Press joins the show to discuss his reporting on this story.
Eloise Klein Healy named LA's first poet laureate
Here in Los Angeles, we've got beaches, great restaurants, museums, and now, we have our own poet laureate. She's 69-year-old Sherman Oaks resident Eloise Klein Healy, an author, publisher and educator. Chosen by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and his Poet Laureate Task Force, she officially takes the position today.
Healy will receive $10,000 a year for her new post, which will run over a two-year term awarded by the Department of Cultural Affairs.
Healy has plans to write poems about Los Angeles, and to take part in efforts to bring more poetry into public places, like Dodger Stadium.
KPCC's Patt Morrison sat down with Healy to talk generally about what a poet laureate does, and what Healy plans to do in the position.
Interview Highlights:
What will you be doing in your new title?
"One of the tasks is actually to write some poems about the city, I don't think that that would be a problem because a lot of the things that I write do involve things that happen in town. I'm very interested in landscapes thats always been very important to me, to be very engaged in where I am. Not only the politics of where I am, but also the place. I love hillsides, I love the way the freeway goes through things, so I just feel like its not a hard thing for me to say, 'Ok, I can write a few poems about the city.'"
Are there any poetry-related projects you hope to work on?
I really feel that its a good idea if you have a civic, public responsibility that you go out and hang out with the people. i think i want to put poetry in places where people don't typically expect it. Like up in Dodger Stadium. Why couldn't we have a short poem about baseball by a Los Angeles poet up on the Jumbotron? I think the problem for poetry is a lot of people just don't feel like they have a point of connection, where they feel like its for them. Maybe they felt in school that they didn't understand it, they don't belong, they're not smart, but I feel like that's something one always deals with when you're a poet is helping people discover that, yeah, it's for everyone."
Can you change the assumption that poetry is a frill, and not a necessity in life?
"Well, case in point what happened after 9/11? Everyone wanted to have something from poets because the desire to connect to deepest deepest feeling often is located in language. When you love somebody you want to tell them in the best way, when you're sad you want the enormity of it to be registered. That's what we do, poets, we find the language that carries those weights. If you're a human being and you feel things and you attempt to express yourself, then you understand what poets do for their work."
Why do you write poetry about every day life?
"When I first started writing I used to get in a lot of trouble because I was a feminist poet writing about cars, and they would say to me why are you doing that and I would say have you ever been to Los Angeles? Where am I spending 40 percent of my time? I'm in a car, if I lived in a different kind of place I'd probably write a different kind of poetry."
Healy reads two of the poems she submitted for consideration:
The Dinner Party: forced-perspective bird nest, boll weevil monument and more
Every Friday we sit down with the guys from the Dinner Party podcast and radio show to get the conversation topics for the weekend. On tap this week; a bird that builds in the complex "forced perspective" architectural concept, a restaurant that broadcasts negative reviews in the bathroom and a monument to the boll weevil.
Robert Carlyle on acting, whiskey and his role in 'California Solo'
Scottish actor Robert Carlyle knows how to leave an impression. He dropped trou in "The Full Monty," playing the leader of a troupe of amateur male strippers, and he terrorized heroin addicts as the psychopath Begbie in "Trainspotting."
Now he's on the hit ABC fantasy show "Once Upon a Time," creating mayhem as an evil Rumplestiltskin. You can see Carlyle in a role that's a bit closer to home. He plays a Scotsman with a deep love of rock and roll in the new film "California Solo," which opens today at La's Nuart Theater. Carlyle joins the show live from the studios of NPR West in Culver City.
Interview Highlights:
On portraying the character of Lachlan in “California Solo,” which was written for him before he met writer/director Marshall Lewy:
“This is the first time that that had ever happened, that any director had written anything specifically for me. I guess my feelings when I read it at first, was, well, if I don’t play this, I don‘t know who is. ‘Cause, even though we had never met, he had obviously studied an awful lot, well, particular characters I had played through the years. And the dialogue flowed very very easily for me. So I thought yeah. It was a very very quick decision for me. I think within a couple of days, I said, ‘yeah, I’ll do this.'"
On the dissimilarities between the character of Lachlan and himself:
“I hardly drink at all. I’m not a very good Scotsman in that respect. I don’t really like alcohol and I’m very happily married with three kids. And, you know, they are my life. So no similarity at all in terms of the character and me. You know, this is a guy...who hasn’t seen his daughter in ten years, I think.”
On the character of Lachlan:
"He has no real feeling of his own self worth. He doesn’t feel that he’s worth anything to anyone. He doesn’t feel as though there is anyone out there who gives a damn about…whether he lives or dies. So he’s a kind of guy with an ambivalence to life in general, really. When you join him at first in the farm, he actually says that he is comfortably numb. I think that kind of sums it up for Lachlan at the beginning of the film, that he has had his moment in the sun, in the '90s with the Brit-pop era and that’s just been taken away through the tragic thing that happens, takes that way. And he’s quite happy then, to kind of live out the rest of his days of on a farm, something that he had done prior to his musical career. He likes it there. He enjoys sitting there in the bar of an evening, and then I think one of the wonderful bits of the movie in my opinion, are the podcasts that he does in his spare time, when he talks about the spectacular deaths of the great musicians, early untimely deaths of the musicians. He calls them flameouts.”
On the origins of the voice of Rumplestiltskin on the series “Once Upon a Time”:
“I have to kind of give it a slightly different tone. And it came from the most bizarre and unusual place. It’s an actual fact, my 6-year-old son. I just heard him one day as he runs about the house doing little voices and playing little games with himself. And he kind of does this, ‘bah bi duh bi duh,’ kind of thing. And I thought, that’s it. That is it. That’s Rumplestiltskin right there. He’s got this childlike quality, this bizarre creepy thing. You know, it’s very cute when a 6-year-old does it, you know when a 50-year-old does it, it’s quite creepy.”
On his one-take Johnnie Walker whiskey advertisement:
“That was a day and a half. I think, if I remember, rightly, I went up and down that hill about between 35 or 40 times…It was actually never meant to be seen by anyone, really. It was what we call back home in the UK, a corporate video, and it was done for Johnnie Walker employees. Johnnie Walker had actually been bought over by a Japanese company called Diageo and they made this thing for their employees to tell them of the history of Johnnie Walker and the whiskey. It makes sense when you know that because you think you’ve never seen a six-and-a-half minute-long commercial. And it can’t be cut into as a commercial. And to be honest with you, I wouldn’t have done it as a commercial anyway. But suddenly it was leaked somehow onto the net and it became this viral hit. It’s astonishing.”
Trailer for "California Solo":
Robert Carlyle in an ad for Johnnie Walker called "The Man Who Walked Around the World:"